City-Scale Traffic Simulation - Performance and Calibration

Abstract

Road congestions in a city-scale (or urban) traffic system are largely determined by the equilibrium between the demand (people's requirement for travel) and the supply (the capacity of the traffic system). In general, there are two types of solutions to manage road congestions in a city-scale traffic system: transport planning and traffic control schemes. Due to the high complexity in a city-scale traffic system and the limited modelling capability of mathematical models, city-scale traffic simulation turns out to be an appealing toolkit to evaluate the holistic impact of transport planning and traffic control schemes to the entire city-scale traffic system. However, a successful deployment and maintenance of a city-scale traffic simulation is not trivial, and limits the feasibility of city-scale traffic simulations in real-world traffic systems. The thesis investigates and then proposes solutions on two challenges in the process of deploying and maintaining a city-scale traffic simulation: the performance optimization of a city-scale traffic simulation and the calibration algorithm to estimate variables (e.g. model parameters and model inputs) in a city-scale traffic simulation.